A Path of Her Own…

Tag Archives: dreams

I have finally finished my little handmade recycled book. I’ve called it “Journeys, Unknown.” I used a cardboard box for most of the structure of this book. I cut the box into smaller pieces and soaked those pieces in water and removed the brown paper layers and smoothed them out to dry. Once dry, they were very nice flat heavy weight pieces of paper. I saved them in a drawer for about a year, and then had an idea of how to use them! I’ve used scraps of paper left over from other projects, found objects, leaves, twigs, stones, fabric, and broken crockery.

This is the cover. I made it from a piece of cardboard I cut from a box. The little broken ceramic leaf was a small dish my daughter saved for me after one of her dogs swept it from a table and it broke. She knew, as she said, that I would find a use for it!

The back of the front cover. A mushroom print I made on an old book page a few years ago one hot summer when I lived in Bend. Another daughter and I went to the grocery and bought some large mushrooms and put them on pieces of paper, caps down, and left them for a few days. This was the resulting print! My computer is not processing the colors correctly, but you get the idea!

Page 1 – I shared this previously. A little carved rabbit, probably from some cuckoo clock I think.

Page 2.

Page 3 A. A leaf I saved from my garden several summer’s ago. I save them in a big book of Shakespeare. This one was so thin, I tore it a little when I stuck it down.

Page 3 B. A couple of poplar leaves from Shakespeare. Page 4. A Gelatin print I did using a fossil saved from Fogarty Creek beach in Oregon.

Page 5. My favorite place. The sea. “…the sea whispers a cradlesong”

Overlay leaf for page 6A. I bought these years ago at some dollar store. They were intended to us as a liner on plates for placing cheese upon. They don’t glue down very well, and they don’t take printing on – so I glued the edges into a folded piece of brown paper and will sew them through the brown paper when I bind the book.

Page 6 A. A skeleton leaf my daughter sent me when I lived in Bend. My daughters are always saving small things for me to use in my art. The leaf is so delicate its like a fragment of lace.

Pages 6 B Water over stones.

Page 7. Recycled pieces of fabric, buttons and paper. Darning is so beautiful to me in it’s utilitarian form , practical; but as art as well. “Darning our lives together with thread pilfered from our dreams…”

I haven’t been working on any art projects lately, but I had a dream some nights ago that stayed with me. It was about a baby horse and my desire to take care of it; to protect it and keep it safe during the night. I sketched out a very quick illustration and used a transfer technique with packing tape to place the words of the dream over my sketch. The type should have come out a little darker, but I did it several times and that’s what I got, a gray typeset, almost like a watermark, which would be very nice in some situations, but I wanted the words to be foremost for this, since my sketch was so crude. It’s a journal page, right? Doesn’t have to be perfect.

Here’s what it says:

I dreamed of a baby horse that needed my care. In my dream, someone told me that I should find a safe hiding place for it during the night – maybe make a nest in “the bushes.” as its mother would do. Cait was walking beside me, and I said to her, “I would never leave a little horse all alone in the bushes all night. Anything could happen. “If I had a motherless baby horse to take care of I would take it right into the house with me at night.” Suddenly we were walking together toward an old farmhouse and I was carrying a foal in my arms. I seemed quite strong and very able to carry the horse and walk the long distance to the house without any trouble at all.

I can’t seem to move past doing these faces! I am doing them now in a handmade muslin book that I won in a giveaway a couple of years ago. I was so afraid I would mess it up that I avoided working in it until I did “He Was His Mother’s Favorite,” (below) that got me started.

Now I’ve decided to fill the whole book with these imaginary faces and add some mixed media scraps, and titles, after I’m finished.

A younger version of “The Lost Boy,” who is also in this muslin book. There is something really satisfying about working on muslin this way. Lynne Hoppe ( see my blogroll for her website) made the book and decided her sewing wasn’t right so she gave it away. Yay! – I won it and have saved it all this time. The muslin is tea-dyed first ( I think) and then each side of the muslin is gessoed and then lightly sanded so the pages are somewhat stiff. It’s almost like painting on loosely stretched canvas – but the muslin is a smoother surface, more sensitive to oil pastels. Sometimes watercolor will seep through the page – but this just makes it more interesting!

This is what the outside, back and front look like. I plan on painting both covers too.

This is what the inside pages look like before I paint on them.

“She Made Wands from Other People’s Wishes” from “Imaginary People I Know”

I think I put too much texture on the under surface of this painting – but these last few paintings have been purely experimental. I like painting over the straight edges of paper underneath, the modeling paste got a little too built up and made for a lumpy complexion.

I had my own reasons for painting this particular subject; just some things I didn’t want to forget.

I had this song running through my mind for several days, Grateful Dead – Scarlet Begonias. One of those times when the lyrics keeps repeating every time I let my mind quiet, so I started to sketch a face to go with the words.

“She had rings on her fingers and bells on her shoes.

And I knew without askin’ she was into the blues.

She wore scarlet begonias tucked into her curls,

I knew right away she was not like other girls….”

Before I began sketching I glued down random pieces of paper left over from other projects and after they were dry I covered them with a coat of gesso. Then I roughly sketched in the face with pencil. When I thought I had pretty good proportions I began painting in the face and hair with gouache. When the gouache was dry I used oil pastels repeating the color and using other colors on top of the orignal drawing/painting. After a day or so of drying time, I coated the surface with matte medium. The oil pastels are very satisfying to work with, and create this painterly look without much work other than smearing around with my finger.

Unfinished canvas #2 is finally finished! I am really happy to be finishing these ghosts, bringing them to completion and daylight. ” The Mermaid’s Hands” began with a whole mermaid. My neighbor suggested upon viewing it that I add some glitter; I think that’s the moment I wasn’t waiting for! I began by painting it over with black gesso and wiping and blotting it off while it was still wet, as the hands began to emerge I realized I didn’t need the whole figure – the hands were less “Ariel” without the body! No glitter needed! (ha)

I have one more large canvas to finish and I will be finished with the unfinished. I don’t usually leave artwork unfinished, so these three were really bugging me. The last one is quite large, but not a lot of color, hopefully it will go fairly quickly and I can begin something new!

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4 Rooms and the Moon

“There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual . Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.” - Rumer Godden